How Jerry Rice Achieved Greatness

Mercenary Trader

Sep. 24, 2012, 4:13 PM

"As every football fan knows, Jerry Rice was the greatest receiver in NFL history, and some football authorities believe he may have been the greatest player at any position. His utter dominance is hard to believe in a league where the competition is so intense and conducted at such a high level. For example, the records he holds for total receptions, total touchdown receptions, and total receiving yards are greater than the second-place totals not by 5 percent or 10 percent, which would be impressive, but by about 50 percent…

"With regard to most players, [the question of what made Rice so good] usually guarantees an argument among sports fans, but in Rice's case the answer is completely noncontroversial. Everyone in the football world seems to agree that Rice was the greatest because he worked harder in practice and in the off-season than anyone else.

"In team workouts he was famous for his hustle; while many receivers will trot back to the quarterback after catching a pass, Rice would sprint to the end zone after each reception. He would typically continue practicing long after the rest of the team had gone home. Most remarkable were his six-days-a-week off-season workouts, which he conducted entirely on his own. Mornings were devoted to cardiovascular work, running a hilly five-mile trail; he would reportedly run ten forty-meter wind sprints up the steepest part. In the afternoons he did equally strenuous weight training. These workouts became legendary as the most demanding in the league, and other players would sometimes join Rice just to see what it was like. Some of them got sick before the day was over.

"Occasionally someone would write to the 49ers' trainer asking for the details of Rice's workout, but the trainer never released the information out of fear that people would hurt themselves trying to duplicate it.

"The lesson that's easiest to draw from Jerry Rice's story is that hard work makes all the difference. Yet we know - from research and from just looking around us - that hard work often doesn't lead to extraordinary performance. We also know that even after an excellent college career, Rice did not possess outstanding speed, a quality that coaches generally consider mandatory in a great receiver. So there must be something else lurking in Rice's story…

"Of course it's true that all NFL players devote most of their work-related time to nongame activities, and that fact is significant. These people, doing their work at its highest level and subject to continuous, unsparing evaluation, don't set up weekday football games for practice; they spend almost all their time on other activities, a fact that we should remember. In the case of Rice, one of the greatest players, the ratio was even more extreme.

"He designed his practice to work on his specific needs. Rice didn't need to do everything well, just certain things. He had to run precise patterns; he had to evade the defenders, sometimes two or three, who were assigned to cover him; he had to outjump them to catch the ball and outmuscle them when they tried to strip it away; then he had to outrun tacklers. So he focused his practice work on exactly these requirements. Not being the fastest receiver in the league turned out not to matter. He became famous for the precision of his patterns. His weight training gave him tremendous strength. His trail running gave him control so he could change directions suddenly without signaling his move. The uphill wind sprints gave him explosive acceleration. Most of all, his endurance training - not something that a speed-focused athlete would normally concentrate on - gave him a giant advantage in the fourth quarter, when his opponents were tired and weak, and he seemed as fresh as he was in the first minute. Time and again, that's when he put the game away.

"Rice and his coaches understood exactly what he needed in order to be dominant. They focused on these things and not on other goals that might have seemed generally desirable, like speed."

Rice was not known for his speed, yet achieved the hallmark of "greatest of all time" in a position where speed is worshiped. What does that say about what is possible, and what is important, in trading?

How hard do you work in the "off-season," or outside trading hours, to achieve your trading goals? How much "extra-mile" type effort do you put into honing, maintaining, and improving your skills?

Imagine you were your own football coach - or rather trading coach. How would you break down and rank the various components of your game? How would you score yourself in these areas - speed, agility, strength, etc - as they cross-compare to trading?

Have you ever considered a comprehensive self-evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses in your methodology… and your trading profile on the whole… with the goal of creating a series of targeted, area-specific developmental programs and research routines to take you to higher levels?